Swine flu: Available doses vary wildly by county

November 12, 2009

While Will County health officials have turned away people seeking the vaccine for the H1N1 flu virus, more than 8,000 vaccine doses sit unused by neighboring Kendall County's health department. Patients there can make an appointment by phone to be vaccinated and can be in and out of a nurse's office within minutes.

It's a puzzle that Will County's health officials are struggling to unravel: Although they have received enough H1N1 flu vaccine to protect just 2.1 percent of their county's 680,000 residents, Kendall County has enough to protect 17 percent of its 103,000 residents.

"We don't understand why a county that's so much smaller than ours is getting more vaccines," said Will County Health Department spokesman Vic Reato. "We thought that maybe the state had lost our order."

At a time when tempers have boiled over because of delays in manufacturing and distribution of the H1N1 vaccine, the apparent disparity in deliveries turned up in a Tribune examination of health department numbers for Chicago and its collar counties. Illinois officials acknowledged some uneven deliveries, due to a complicated distribution system that is not based solely on population.

"The system isn't perfect," said Illinois Department of Public Health spokeswoman Melaney Arnold. "It's very frustrating for people and we understand that, but we're trying to work through the inequities."

Nationally, the vaccine is allocated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to states based on population. Chicago receives its allotment directly from the CDC, but the rest of Illinois goes through the state health department, which does not rely on any hard-and-fast formula when deciding which counties, hospitals and other health care providers receive vaccine doses, officials said.

Instead, it uses a combination of factors, including population, ability to administer the vaccine quickly, whether clinics have already been scheduled and how many other health-care providers there are nearby, Arnold said.

As a result, the number of vaccine doses distributed to health departments in the collar counties varies. Kendall's health department has received the most doses per capita and Will the lowest, according to the numbers obtained by the Tribune.